Computing clusters can comprise many hundreds or thousands of nodes, where each node has its own dedicated local storage that contains an operating system image, application images, and configurations. From time to time it is desirable to reimage the operating system and/or portions of a software configuration to bring all nodes up to some consistent level of configuration. Unfortunately, legacy techniques often rely on a computing platform outside the cluster to facilitate reimaging, however as clusters become large and larger, use of such an external node can become “swamped” with work, and can introduce high latency between the time a reimaging procedure is initiated and the time it completes with all nodes being reimaged and restarted.
What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve over legacy techniques and/or over other considered approaches. Some of the approaches described in this background section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.